A reasoned opinion on the urgent maintenance

Q u o t e:
At the end of the day, it comes down to this -

I pay blizzard a monthly subscription fee to play World of Warcraft. This requires me to connect to their server. When they take their server down for scheduled maintenance, I accept it without grumbling, as I understand the nature of servers and software. However, when they take down a server for emergency maintenance because something has gone wrong, outside the standard maintenance window, I expect them to have a failover(redundant) server.

Due to the architecture of World of Warcraft, this is not possible. While data is essentially never lost even in the case of a realm outage or other urgent situation, there exists no effective means to provide realm redundancy currently due to a variety of factors

Q u o t e:
If I proposed a project, and detailed a single server (which as we all know is a single point of failure, and therefore unacceptable), my colleagues would look embarrassed until someone finally spoke up, and told me I appeared to have fallen asleep during a key phase of planning.

Anyone in the IT industry, at any level, knows that you must have resiliency in your infrastructure.

Somehow, blizzard has forgotten this, or maybe they had graphic artist doing their engineering. I don't really know why blizzard has failed so badly in this respect, I simply want them to fix it.

We agree, actually. That is, after all, why the emergency maintenance is occurring. To deal with an unexpected issue that has arisen so that it can be resolved and we can get our players back into the game as swiftly as possible.

Q u o t e:
An above poster mentioned stuffing money into servers would fix the issue - in this, despite his laughably sarcastic intent, he was correct. Purchase, configure, test and deploy a resilient set of servers. Ideally, you could even deploy them at a separate data center.

Actually, our realms are as 'money stuffed' as they can get at the moment. We are using top of the line, custom hardware that is designed specifically for the purposes that it is set to. We have several different data centers spread throughout the world, actually.

I understand your intent, and your frustration, but the logistics of the situation are more complex than they seem from the exterior.

Q u o t e:
But hey, why should blizzard listen? We aren't going anywhere.

We listen all the time, and player feedback is incredibly important to us. We have a specific means where players can provide feedback - the Suggestions forum is reviewed on a regular basis by our Development staff.

Complex systems are prone to issues - and make no mistake, World of Warcraft is an incredibly complex and ever-changing system - some downtime is to be expected from time to time, even outside of scheduled maintenance periods. Our goal is to provide the best possible experience for our players, and to provide it as consistently as we can. We have world class staff and materials dedicated to doing so, and I hope that you'll find that in the vast majority of the time, at all hours, Azeroth awaits your urge to adventure.

Q u o t e:

You complain about this happening once after maintenance, try playing on Thrall this happens everyday and the entire realm complains and is ignored

Thrall is certainly not being ignored. Sometimes a realm or battlegroup will develop an issue or string of issues, and the precise causes are not easily identifiable or easily resolved once identified.

Rest assured that Thrall will continue to be monitored and receive attention until the issues affecting it are resolved.

Q u o t e:
The problem with your logic is that by the very nature of the game and character development, you are limited to a single server.

Fortunately, this simply is not so. While in some ways, focused attention is rewarded in terms of character development, it is possible to maintain multiple characters, and to maintain one's characters across multiple realms. Whether one does so or not is a matter of choice, and not all players make that choice.

Regardless, we recognize that many players do focus their attention on a single realm, and that any realm outage can be distressing. We will continue to work to make these realms available as soon as we can.